“Is he still alive?”
“Powers? As of six when he came out of the operating theater he was in critical condition.”
“Can he speak? Will he regain consciousness?”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Trotter demanded. “Just go, Kirk. Leave it be.”
“I have to know.”
“Maybe we treated you shabbily. I have no defense. It’s just the way it went. But there’s nothing to be gained—”
“Is he conscious?” McGarvey persisted.
Trotter sighed. “I don’t think so. From what I understand he may never come out of it, and if he does he’ll probably be a vegetable. It’s all over. Go.”
“But he was innocent.”
“We know that.”
“So was Yarnell.”
“What are you talking about? What the hell are you saying? Good Lord, haven’t we gone through enough?”
McGarvey looked at the tape recorder lying on the desk. “It was a Baranov plot,” he said. “And he will have won if you publish the story that Yarnell was a traitor.”
“We have the evidence.”
“Circumstantial, all of it,” McGarvey said. He was thinking about Basulto’s story, about Owens’s hatred of Yarnell, who was probably guilty of seducing his mentor’s wife and of arrogance and of a certain hardness of character and purpose. He thought about Evita and everything she’d told him. She’d been manipulated all right, but by Baranov not by her husband, who had in his own way tried in the end to insulate her. And he thought about poor Janos, who had died on a fool’s errand. Yarnell had not murdered them. Baranov had.
“John?”
“I’m here.”
“I’ll meet you at Leonard Day’s house. Right now. This morning. Call him and tell him we’re on the way out.”
“I won’t.”
“I think you will.” He hung up. It was all clear to him now. All the pieces fit, from the hijacking of the flight out of Miami in which the two CIA officers were murdered to the incident last night. Yarnell had been doing his duty as he saw it up there. Nothing more.
McGarvey cleaned up, ordered a rental car through the hotel desk, and drove out of the city up to Day’s palatial home on Lake Artemesia near College Park. The morning was cool and windy. The lake was dotted with whitecaps. No one was fishing. A plain gray Chevrolet sedan with government plates was parked under the overhang when McGarvey drove up. It was at places like this, he thought, that the real work of government service was often conducted. It didn’t offer him much comfort.
Inside Trotter and Day were waiting for him in the study. They were drinking coffee. Trotter looked terrible; his eyes were bloodshot, his tie undone, his jacket disheveled. He hadn’t changed from last night. Day, on the other hand, seemed fresh in his three-piece pinstriped suit. He also looked angry, even imperious, sitting behind his big leather-topped desk.
“I haven’t got time for your asinine bullshit this morning, McGarvey. I want that straight from the beginning here,” Day said. “You want money we’ll give it to you, although John tells me that you refused his very generous offer.”
There had been no offer, but it didn’t matter. “Yarnell and Powers were both innocent,” McGarvey said, facing him across the desk like a schoolboy before his masters.
“So John has told me. And what of your painstakingly gathered evidence?”
“I was wrong.”
“He was wrong,” Day hooted looking over at Trotter. “What do you suppose he was wrong about? on his loyalty. Throw our entire secret service into shambles just at the moment we most need its services.”
“But what did Jules and Asher have to do with it, Kirk,” Trotter asked.
“I expect that operation was designed to do nothing more than get Powers’s attention. He and Baranov have known each other for more than twenty-five years.”
“It was him in Mexico City?” Trotter asked.
McGarvey nodded.
“What are you talking about?” Day demanded. “Who? What about Mexico City?”
“When Yarnell was in Mexico City he worked Baranov, who at the time was his counterpart at the Soviet embassy. One evening Powers apparently showed up at a party that Yarnell threw and at which Baranov had supplied the women.”
Day’s eyes narrowed. His sarcastic manner was gone. “And there was an indiscretion?”
McGarvey nodded. “Most likely. Just that one night. Yarnell might not have thought much about it at the time, but Baranov had, and so had Powers.”
“It was the link between them all these years,” Trotter said, understanding the situation at a much deeper level than Day because of his training.
“Why in God’s name did he run to Powers last night? Why did he shoot him? It doesn’t make sense, McGarvey.”
“It didn’t to me at first,” McGarvey said. “Not until this morning. But first you have to understand that this entire affair, everything that has happened, was orchestrated by Baranov.”
“He’s that good?” Day asked.
McGarvey nodded.
“And it started, you say, with the deaths of Jules and Asher?”
Darby Yarnell’s guilt or his innocence?”
“It was a Soviet plot,” McGarvey went on doggedly. He wanted to get this over with and leave before he did something truly stupid like going across the desk and smashing Day’s pretty face.
The study was a pleasant room. It smelled of books, leather, Day’s cologne, and coffee. A lot of the books were privately bound in matched covers. McGarvey wondered if anyone had ever read them.
“It began with the hijacking of the Aeromexico flight out of Miami,” he said. “Planned and financed by the Soviet-run CESTA network.”
Trotter sat forward a little. “The weapons were Soviet made. Supplied by CESTA.”
“Because of the missile thing?” Day asked. “Is that why those two were shot down? Were the Russians afraid of an early discovery?”
“No,” McGarvey said patiently. “I think the missile thing will turn out to be simply another Cuba.”
“Simply,” Day said in amazement.
“The Cuban missile crisis got the Russians exactly what they wanted all along. A promise from us to never again intervene in Cuban affairs. It worked then, and I suspect it will work in Mexico.”
“If that wasn’t the Soviet’s goal, and I’m certainly not saying that I agree with you, then what?”
“How effective was Powers as a DCI?” McGarvey countered. He was thinking about the tape recording.
“Very,” Day said. “The best we’ve ever had, bar none.”
“Where is he now?”
“In the hospital, of course—”
“Baranov has won,” McGarvey said quietly. “Powers was a thorn in his side. Has been for years and years, so he wanted to get rid of him. Cast doubt
“By killing them and making sure that Powers knew the weapons were Russian made and CESTA supplied, Baranov was putting Powers on notice that trouble was coming.”
“He warned Powers.”
“In effect. He wanted Powers to become defensive. Just one more link in a very long chain of evidence.”
Day shook his head, and Trotter had to explain it for him. “Innocent men aren’t generally defensive. Just another piece of circumstantial evidence.”
“The Cuban was working for Baranov, of course,” Day said.
“From the beginning,” McGarvey said. “And you have to admire him. He did a fine job.”
“Where is he now?”
“Havana, I suppose. Picking up a medal. Or a bullet.”
“And Darby’s ex-wife?” Trotter asked.
“Hopefully on her way to New York. Baranov actually came to New York about nine months ago to see her. He told her that someone like me would be coming around asking questions about her ex-husband. She had a grudge, and she had seen things in Mexico City that she couldn’t possibly have understood. At the time Yarnell was very close to Baranov. They did everything together. Two young spies, both brilliant, both headstrong and arrogant, were working each other. Seducing each other, playing the game on a grand scale. What was a poor little Mexican princess supposed to believe when she saw them together?”